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STAT August 8, 2024
Mohana Ravindranath

How UnitedHealth used a questionable artery-screening program to boost payments

My colleagues’ relentless examination of the nation’s largest health insurer has turned up yet another problematic practice: Pushing clinicians to use a thinly tested medical device to screen patients for artery disease, boosting its own payments from the federal government for years. Each questionable diagnosis for peripheral artery disease netted UnitedHealth Group thousands of extra dollars for Medicare Advantage beneficiaries, and clinicians told STAT that in many cases, those diagnoses weren’t even medically useful, incurring false positives or only flagging early-stage disease that isn’t typically treated.

“The corporation views patients as entities that have money attached to their bodies,” Michael Good, a retired physician who worked at a Connecticut...

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